Editor and Writer

Shifting Neighborhoods

My wife and I just moved ten blocks south of our old place, from the CARAG neighborhood into East Harriet. This doesn’t mean much except for a few things:

I went from three coffee shops within easy walking distance to zero cafes anywhere. There’s one on the corner that opens exactly when I catch the bus to work.

I catch a new express route to work, and here’s the strange thing about Minneapolis geography. My old and new buses arrive around 7:03 a.m. each morning, and the commute gets me to work around 7:50 a.m., yet the MetroTransit schedule insists my old route was a 40-minute commute and the new one is 25 minutes. How does that work? Non-Euclidian geography.

So far I haven’t witnessed or heard any gun battles in the streets or alleys, so that’s a bonus.

We have much more floor space and storage in the new place. I can brew beer out back and bottle it in the basement, which is in great condition and appears to be black mold free.

Work is going well. It’s slower in the summer, since I’m still at the University (15 months and counting!), so I can use the time for Lynda.com and Udemy courses or even some noncredit courses the U offers. I’ve taken one on self-publishing and another on cleaning up your writing and “discovering your authentic voice”. The attendees are almost always retirees but the courses are very interesting and useful.

As for writing… I haven’t done anything I can share here. With my mainstream fiction, I just get rejection letters and emails. Exactly one of my stories has been accepted by any literary magazine. But with my adult erotic fiction, the stuff I self-publish and distribute with a pseudonym and everything, I’ve sold 30 copies of three short stories and I have a growing, enthusiastic fanbase, and I’ve been invited to host a booth at a convention. The mainstream writing market makes me feel uninteresting and untalented, but the adult fiction community is on the edge of their seats for my next installment.

In which basket would you store all of your eggs? Against which wall would you keep banging your head?